John Whalen, PhD

John Whalen, PhD

11.8K Subscribers

CEO, AI Research Leader, Cognitive Scientist, O'Reilly Author

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John Whalen, PhD will transform your research with Agentic AI

I’m CEO of Brilliant Experience, have a PhD in cognitive science, and wrote Design for How People Think (O’Reilly).

For 20 years, I’ve helped teams at companies like Google, GSK, and Capital One better understand their customers, capture insights, and build better products.

When AI started reshaping research, I got curious and learned. My team ran “AI vs. Humans” studies to see where AI excels, where human judgment matters most, and how to effectively blend both.

I’ll teach you how to create trustworthy AI research workflows that let you trace every step and insight.

Then advance to the next course and learn to orchestrate agentic research teams, work strategically with synthetic users grounded in real data, and bring in human judgement so you can scale research without losing rigor.

Key Clients
Google
Capital One
Bloomberg
GSK
Pinterest

Alumni reviews

Kristina

Live cohort
Research Operations Specialist · Jimdo

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

John is a fantastic instructor. He explains things clearly and keeps every lesson interesting. I joined thinking I already knew a lot, but I quickly realized how much more there was to learn. Highly recommend!

Amit

Live cohort
UX Research Director · Docusign

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

Very helpful course. John's approach is very hands-on and collaborative. He combines the right elements of new material instruction, demos, and discussions. Highly recommend to anyone looking to level up on agentic workflows across the UX Research Lifecycle.

Gabriela

Live cohort
Senior UX Researcher · Emma Sleep

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

John provides a strong framework for making each step inspectable, defining clear scoring criteria, and ensuring claims are grounded in evidence. A thoughtful, actionable course that brings much-needed rigour to applying agentic AI in research.

Mirjeta

Live cohort
UX Designer · Kode Labs

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

As a UX designer, I came in with a surface-level understanding of AI agents. This course changed that. I now have a much clearer picture of how agents work, how to break them into components, and how to structure them so they're reliable and useful in real products. The content was practical and directly relevant to product work. I'd recommend it to anyone on a product team who wants to move beyond the hype and actually design agentic experiences.

Rita

Live cohort
Senior UX Researcher · Springer Nature

Agentic AI for Product Teams: Build Workflows & Agents You Can Trust

The workflows shared in this course are very valuable to start your own journey in building agentic AI processes to support UX research. John creates a supportive and rich experimentation environment and discusses at length the different aspects involved in agentic AI. If you come to this course with a curious mind and wanting to know exactly how to build and implement agentic workflows, it won't disappoint.